Chapter 7

Yes, come away with me--fields of Soria, quiet evenings, violet mountains, aspens of the river, green dreams of the grey earth, bitter melancholy of the crumbling city-- perhaps it is that you have become the background of my life.

Men of the high Numantine plain, who keep God like old--Christians, may the sun of Spain fill you with joy and light and abundance!

II

A frail sound of a tunic trailing across the infertile earth, and the sonorous weeping of the old bells. The dying embers of the horizon smoke. White ancestral ghosts go lighting the stars.

--Open the balcony-window. The hour of illusion draws near... The afternoon has gone to sleep and the bells dream.

III

Figures in the fields against the sky! Two slow oxen plough on a hillside early in autumn, and between the black heads bent down under the weight of the yoke, hangs and sways a basket of reeds, a child's cradle; And behind the yoke stride a man who leans towards the earth and a woman who, into the open furrows, throws the seed. Under a cloud of carmine and flame, in the liquid green gold of the setting, their shadows grow monstrous.

IV

Naked is the earth and the soul howls to the wan horizon like a hungry she-wolf. What do you seek, poet, in the sunset? Bitter going, for the path weighs one down, the frozen wind, and the coming night and the bitterness of distance.... On the white path the trunks of frustrate trees show black, on the distant mountains there is gold and blood. The sun dies....

What do you seek, poet, in the sunset?

V

Silver hills and grey ploughed lands, violet outcroppings of rock through which the Duero traces its curve like a cross-bow about Soria, dark oak-wood, wild cliffs, bald peaks, and the white roads and the aspens of the river.

Afternoons of Soria, mystic and warlike, to-day I am very sad for you, sadness of love, Fields of Soria, where it seems that the rocks dream, come with me! Violet rocky outcroppings, silver hills and grey ploughed lands.

VI

We think to create festivals of love out of our love, to burn new incense on untrodden mountains; and to keep the secret of our pale faces, and why in the bacchanals of life we carry empty glasses, while with tinkling echoes and laughing foams the gold must of the grape....

A hidden bird among the branches of the solitary park whistles mockery.... We feel the shadow of a dream in our wine-glass, and something that is earth in our flesh feels the dampness of the garden like a caress.

VII

I have been back to see the golden aspens, aspens of the road along the Duero between San Polo and San Saturio, beyond the old stiff walls of Soria, barbican towards Aragon of the Castilian lands.

These poplars of the river, that chime when the wind blows their dry leaves to the sound of the water, have in their bark the names of lovers, initials and dates. Aspens of love where yesterday the branches were full of nightingales, aspens that to-morrow will sing under the scented wind of the springtime, aspens of love by the water that speeds and goes by dreaming, aspens of the bank of the Duero, come away with me.

VIII

Cold Soria, clear Soria, key of the outlands, with the warrior castle in ruins beside the Duero, and the stiff old walls, and the blackened houses.

Dead city of barons and soldiers and huntsmen, whose portals bear the shields of a hundred hidalgos; city of hungry greyhounds, of lean greyhounds that swarm among the dirty lanes and howl at midnight when the crows caw.

Cold Soria! The clock of the Lawcourts has struck one. Soria, city of Castile, so beautiful under the moon.

IX

AT A FRIEND'S BURIAL

They put him away in the earth a horrible July afternoon under a sun of fire.

A step from the open grave grew roses with rotting petals among geraniums of bitter fragrance, red-flowered. The sky a pale blue. A wind hard and dry.

Hanging on the thick ropes, the two gravediggers let the coffin heavily down into the grave.

It struck the bottom with a sharp sound, solemnly, in the silence.

The sound of a coffin striking the earth is something unutterably solemn.

The heavy clods broke into dust over the black coffin.

A white mist of dust rose in the air out of the deep grave.

And you, without a shadow now, sleep. Long peace to your bones. For all time you sleep a tranquil and a real sleep.

X

THE IBERIAN GOD

Like the cross-bowman, the gambler in the song, the Iberian had an arrow for his god when he shattered the grain with hail and ruined the fruits of autumn; and a gloria when he fattened the barley and the oats that were to make bread to-morrow. "God of ruin, I worship because I wait and because I fear. I bend in prayer to the earth a blasphemous heart.

"Lord, through whom I snatch my bread with pain, I know your strength, I know my slavery. Lord of the clouds in the east that trample the country-side, of dry autumns and late frosts and of the blasts of heat that scorch the harvests!

"Lord of the iris in the green meadows where the sheep graze, Lord of the fruit the worms gnaw and of the hut the whirlwind shatters, your breath gives life to the fire in the hearth, your warmth ripens the tawny grain, and your holy hand, St. John's eve, hardens the stone of the green olive.

"Lord of riches and poverty, Of fortune and mishap, who gives to the rich luck and idleness, and pain and hope to the poor!

"Lord, Lord, in the inconstant wheel of the year I have sown my sowing that has an equal chance with the coins of a gambler sown on the gambling-table!

"Lord, a father to-day, though stained with yesterday's blood, two-faced of love and vengeance, to you, dice cast into the wind, goes my prayer, blasphemy and praise!"

This man who insults God in his altars, without more care of the frown of fate, also dreamed of paths across the seas and said: "It is God who walks upon the waters."

Is it not he who put God above war, beyond fate, beyond the earth, beyond the sea and death?

Did he not give the greenest bough of the dark-green Iberian oak for God's holy bonfire, and for love flame one with God?

But to-day ... What does a day matter? for the new household gods there are plains in forest shade and green boughs in the old oak-woods.

Though long the land waits for the curved plough to open the first furrow, there is sowing for God's grain under thistles and burdocks and nettles.

What does a day matter? Yesterday waits for to-morrow, to-morrow for infinity; men of Spain, neither is the past dead, nor is to-morrow, nor yesterday, written.

Who has seen the face of the Iberian God? I wait for the Iberian man who with strong hands will carve out of Castilian oak The parched God of the grey land.

_XII: A Catalan Poet_

_It is time for sailing; the swallow has come chattering and the mellow west wind; the meadows are already in bloom; the sea is silent and the waves the rough winds pummeled. Up anchors and loose the hawsers, sailor, set every stitch of canvas. This I, Priapos the harbor god, command you, man, that you may sail for all manner of ladings._ (_Leonidas in the Greek Anthology._)

Catalonia like Greece is a country of mountains and harbors, where the farmers and herdsmen of the hills can hear in the morning the creak of oars and the crackling of cordage as the great booms of the wing-shaped sails are hoisted to the tops of the stumpy masts of the fishermen's boats. Barcelona with its fine harbor nestling under the towering slopes of Montjuic has been a trading city since most ancient times. In the middle ages the fleets of its stocky merchants were the economic scaffolding which underlay the pomp and heraldry of the great sea kingdom of the Aragonese. To this day you can find on old buildings the arms of the kings of Aragon and the counts of Barcelona in Mallorca and Manorca and Ibiza and Sardinia and Sicily and Naples. It follows that when Catalonia begins to reemerge as a nucleus of national consciousness after nearly four centuries of subjection to Castile, poets speaking Catalan, writing Catalan, shall be poets of the mountains and of the sea.

Yet this time the motor force is not the sailing of white argosies towards the east. It is textile mills, stable, motionless, drawing about them muddled populations, raw towns, fattening to new arrogance the descendants of those stubborn burghers who gave the kings of Aragon and of Castile such vexing moments. (There's a story of one king who was so chagrined by the tight-pursed contrariness of the Cortes of Barcelona that he died of a broken heart in full parliament assembled.) This growth of industry during the last century, coupled with the reawakening of the whole Mediterranean, took form politically in the Catalan movement for secession from Spain, and in literature in the resurrection of Catalan thought and Catalan language.

Naturally the first generation was not interested in the manufactures that were the dynamo that generated the ferment of their lives. They had first to state the emotions of the mountains and the sea and of ancient heroic stories that had been bottled up in their race during centuries of inexpressiveness. For another generation perhaps the symbols will be the cluck of oiled cogs, the whirring of looms, the dragon forms of smoke spewed out of tall chimneys, and the substance will be the painful struggle for freedom, for sunnier, richer life of the huddled mobs of the slaves of the machines. For the first men conscious of their status as Catalans the striving was to make permanent their individual lives in terms of political liberty, of the mist-capped mountains and the changing sea.

Of this first generation was Juan Maragall who died in 1912, five years after the shooting of Ferrer, after a life spent almost entirely in Barcelona writing for newspapers,--as far as one can gather, a completely peaceful well-married existence, punctuated by a certain amount of political agitation in the cause of the independence of Catalonia, the life of a placid and recognized literary figure; "_un maitre_" the French would have called him.

Perhaps six centuries before, in Palma de Mallorca, a young nobleman, a poet, a skilled player on the lute had stood tiptoe for attainment before the high-born and very stately lady he had courted through many moonlight nights, when her eye had chilled his quivering love suddenly and she had pulled open her bodice with both hands and shown him her breasts, one white and firm and the other swollen black and purple with cancer. The horror of the sight of such beauty rotting away before his eyes had turned all his passion inward and would have made him a saint had his ideas been more orthodox; as it was the Blessed Ramon Lull lived to write many mystical works in Catalan and Latin, in which he sought the love of God in the love of Earth after the manner of the sufi of Persia. Eventually he attained bloody martyrdom arguing with the sages in some North African town. Somehow the spirit of the tortured thirteenth-century mystic was born again in the calm Barcelona journalist, whose life was untroubled by the impact of events as could only be a life comprising the last half of the nineteenth century. In Maragall's writings modulated in the lovely homely language of the peasants and fishermen of Catalonia, there flames again the passionate metaphor of Lull.

Here is a rough translation of one of his best known poems:

At sunset time drinking at the spring's edge I drank down the secrets of mysterious earth.

Deep in the runnel I saw the stainless water born out of darkness for the delight of my mouth,

and it poured into my throat and with its clear spurting there filled me entirely mellowness of wisdom.

When I stood straight and looked, mountains and woods and meadows seemed to me otherwise, everything altered.

Above the great sunset there already shone through the glowing carmine contours of the clouds the white sliver of the new moon.

It was a world in flower and the soul of it was I.

I the fragrant soul of the meadows that expands at flower-time and reaping-time.

I the peaceful soul of the herds that tinkle half-hidden by the tall grass.

I the soul of the forest that sways in waves like the sea, and has as far horizons.

And also I was the soul of the willow tree that gives every spring its shade.

I the sheer soul of the cliffs where the mist creeps up and scatters.

And the unquiet soul of the stream that shrieks in shining waterfalls.

I was the blue soul of the pond that looks with strange eyes on the wanderer.

I the soul of the all-moving wind and the humble soul of opening flowers.

I was the height of the high peaks...

The clouds caressed me with great gestures and the wide love of misty spaces clove to me, placid.

I felt the delightfulness of springs born in my flanks, gifts of the glaciers; and in the ample quietude of horizons I felt the reposeful sleep of storms.

And when the sky opened about me and the sun laughed on my green planes people, far off, stood still all day staring at my sovereign beauty.

But I, full of the lust that makes furious the sea and mountains lifted myself up strongly through the sky lifted the diversity of my flanks and entrails...

At sunset time drinking at the spring's edge I drank down the secrets of mysterious earth.

The sea and mountains, mist and cattle and yellow broom-flowers, and fishing boats with lateen sails like dark wings against the sunrise towards Mallorca: delight of the nose and the eyes and the ears in all living perceptions until the poison of other-worldliness wells up suddenly in him and he is a Christian and a mystic full of echoes of old soul-torturing. In Maragall's most expressive work, a sequence of poems called _El Comte Arnau_, all this is synthesized. These are from the climax.

All the voices of the earth acclaim count Arnold because from the dark trial he has come back triumphant.

"Son of the earth, son of the earth, count Arnold, now ask, now ask what cannot you do?"

"Live, live, live forever, I would never die: to be like a wheel revolving; to live with wine and a sword."

"Wheels roll, roll, but they count the years."

"Then I would be a rock immobile to suns or storms."

"Rock lives without life forever impenetrable."

"Then the ever-moving sea that opens a path for all things."

"The sea is alone, alone, you go accompanied."

"Then be the air when it flames in the light of the deathless sun."

"But air and sun are loveless, ignorant of eternity."

"Then to be man more than man to be earth palpitant."

"You shall be wheel and rock, you shall be the mist-veiled sea you shall be the air in flame, you shall be the whirling stars, you shall be man more than man for you have the will for it. You shall run the plains and hills, all the earth that is so wide, mounted on a horse of flame you shall be tireless, terrible as the tramp of the storms All the voices of earth will cry out whirling about you. They will call you spirit in torment call you forever damned."

Night. All the beauty of Adalaisa asleep at the feet of naked Christ. Arnold goes pacing a dark path; there is silence among the mountains; in front of him the rustling lisp of a river, a pool.... Then it is lost and soundless. Arnold stands under the sheer portal.

He goes searching the cells for Adalaisa and sees her sleeping, beautiful, prone at the feet of the naked Christ, without veil without kerchief, without cloak, gestureless, without any defense, there, sleeping....

She had a great head of turbulent hair.

"How like fine silk your hair, Adalaisa," thinks Arnold. But he looks at her silently. She sleeps, she sleeps and little by little a flush spreads over all her face as if a dream had crept through her gently until she laughs aloud very softly with a tremulous flutter of the lips.

"What amorous lips, Adalaisa," thinks Arnold. But he looks at her silently.

A great sigh swells through her, sleeping, like a seawave, and fades to stillness.

"What sighs swell in your breast, Adalaisa," thinks Arnold. But he stares at her silently.

But when she opens her eyes he, awake, tingling, carries her off in his arms.

When they burst out into the open fields it is day.

But the fear of life gushes suddenly to muddy the dear wellspring of sensation, and the poet, beaten to his knees, writes:

And when the terror-haunted moment comes to close these earthly eyes of mine, open for me, Lord, other greater eyes to look upon the immensity of your face.

But before that moment comes, through the medium of an extraordinarily terse and unspoiled language, a language that has not lost its earthy freshness by mauling and softening at the hands of literary generations, what a lilting crystal-bright vision of things. It is as if the air of the Mediterranean itself, thin, brilliant, had been hammered into cadences. The verse is leaping and free, full of echoes and refrains. The images are sudden and unlabored like the images in the Greek anthology: a hermit released from Nebuchadnezzar's spell gets to his feet "like a bear standing upright"; fishing boats being shoved off the beach slide into the sea one by one "like village girls joining a dance"; on a rough day the smacks with reefed sails "skip like goats at the harbor entrance." There are phrases like "the great asleepness of the mountains"; "a long sigh like a seawave through her sleep"; "my speech of her is like a flight of birds that lead your glance into intense blue sky"; "the disquieting unquiet sea." Perhaps it is that the eyes are sharpened by the yearning to stare through the brilliant changing forms of things into some intenser beyond. Perhaps it takes a hot intoxicating draught of divinity to melt into such white fire the various colors of the senses. Perhaps earthly joy is intenser for the beckoning flames of hell.

The daily life, too, to which Maragall aspires seems strangely out of another age. That came home to me most strongly once, talking to a Catalan after a mountain scramble in the eastern end of Mallorca. We sat looking at the sea that was violet with sunset, where the sails of the homecoming fishing boats were the wan yellow of primroses. Behind us the hills were sharp pyrites blue. From a window in the adobe hut at one side of us came a smell of sizzling olive oil and tomatoes and peppers and the muffled sound of eggs being beaten. We were footsore, hungry, and we talked about women and love. And after all it was marriage that counted, he told me at last, women's bodies and souls and the love of them were all very well, but it was the ordered life of a family, children, that counted; the family was the immortal chain on which lives were strung; and he recited this quatrain, saying, in that proud awefilled tone with which Latins speak of creative achievement, "By our greatest poet, Juan Maragall":

Canta esposa, fila i canta que el pati em faras suau Quan l'esposa canta i fila el casal s'adorm en pau.

It was hard explaining how all our desires lay towards the completer and completer affirming of the individual, that we in Anglo-Saxon countries felt that the family was dead as a social unit, that new cohesions were in the making.

"I want my liberty," he broke in, "as much as--as Byron did, liberty of thought and action." He was silent a moment; then he said simply, "But I want a wife and children and a family, mine, mine."

Then the girl who was cooking leaned out of the window to tell us in soft Mallorquin that supper was ready. She had a full brown face flushed on the cheek-bones and given triangular shape like an El Greco madonna's face by the bright blue handkerchief knotted under the chin. Her breasts hung out from her body, solid like a Victory's under the sleek grey shawl as she leaned from the window. In her eyes that were sea-grey there was an unimaginable calm. I thought of Penelope sitting beside her loom in a smoky-raftered hall, grey eyes looking out on a sailless sea. And for a moment I understood the Catalan's phrase: the family was the chain on which lives were strung, and all of Maragall's lyricizing of wifehood,

When the wife sits singing as she spins all the house can sleep in peace.

From the fishermen's huts down the beach came an intense blue smoke of fires; above the soft rustle of the swell among the boats came the chatter of many sleepy voices, like the sound of sparrows in a city park at dusk. The day dissolved slowly in utter timelessness. And when the last fishing boat came out of the dark sea, the tall slanting sail folding suddenly as the wings of a sea-gull alighting, the red-brown face of the man in the bow was the face of returning Odysseus. It was not the continuity of men's lives I felt, but their oneness. On that beach, beside that sea, there was no time.

When we were eating in the whitewashed room by the light of three brass olive oil lamps, I found that my argument had suddenly crumbled. What could I, who had come out of ragged and barbarous outlands, tell of the art of living to a man who had taught me both system and revolt? So am I, to whom the connubial lyrics of Patmore and Ella Wheeler Wilcox have always seemed inexpressible soiling of possible loveliness, forced to bow before the rich cadences with which Juan Maragall, Catalan, poet of the Mediterranean, celebrates the _familia_.

And in Maragall's work it is always the Mediterranean that one feels, the Mediterranean and the men who sailed on it in black ships with bright pointed sails. Just as in Homer and Euripides and Pindar and Theocritus and in that tantalizing kaleidoscope, the Anthology, beyond the grammar and the footnotes and the desolation of German texts there is always the rhythm of sea waves and the smell of well-caulked ships drawn up on dazzling beaches, so in Maragall, beyond the graceful well-kept literary existence, beyond wife and children and pompous demonstrations in the cause of abstract freedom, there is the sea lashing the rocky shins of the Pyrenees,--actual, dangerous, wet.

In this day when we Americans are plundering the earth far and near for flowers and seeds and ferments of literature in the hope, perhaps vain, of fallowing our thin soil with manure rich and diverse and promiscuous so that the somewhat sickly plants of our own culture may burst sappy and green through the steel and cement and inhibitions of our lives, we should not forget that northwest corner of the Mediterranean where the Langue d'Oc is as terse and salty as it was in the days of Pierre Vidal, whose rhythms of life, intrinsically Mediterranean, are finding new permanence--poetry richly ordered and lucid.

To the Catalans of the last fifty years has fallen the heritage of the oar which the cunning sailor Odysseus dedicated to the Sea, the earth-shaker, on his last voyage. And the first of them is Maragall.

_XIII: Talk by the Road_